tcp: use RACK to detect losses

This patch implements the second half of RACK that uses the the most
recent transmit time among all delivered packets to detect losses.

tcp_rack_mark_lost() is called upon receiving a dubious ACK.
It then checks if an not-yet-sacked packet was sent at least
"reo_wnd" prior to the sent time of the most recently delivered.
If so the packet is deemed lost.

The "reo_wnd" reordering window starts with 1msec for fast loss
detection and changes to min-RTT/4 when reordering is observed.
We found 1msec accommodates well on tiny degree of reordering
(<3 pkts) on faster links. We use min-RTT instead of SRTT because
reordering is more of a path property but SRTT can be inflated by
self-inflicated congestion. The factor of 4 is borrowed from the
delayed early retransmit and seems to work reasonably well.

Since RACK is still experimental, it is now used as a supplemental
loss detection on top of existing algorithms. It is only effective
after the fast recovery starts or after the timeout occurs. The
fast recovery is still triggered by FACK and/or dupack threshold
instead of RACK.

We introduce a new sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_recovery for future
experiments of loss recoveries. For now RACK can be disabled by
setting it to 0.

Signed-off-by: Yuchung Cheng <ycheng@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Neal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt b/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt
index 502d6a572b4f..85752c81c5ec 100644
--- a/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt
+++ b/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt
@@ -433,6 +433,15 @@ tcp_orphan_retries - INTEGER
 	you should think about lowering this value, such sockets
 	may consume significant resources. Cf. tcp_max_orphans.
 
+tcp_recovery - INTEGER
+	This value is a bitmap to enable various experimental loss recovery
+	features.
+
+	RACK: 0x1 enables the RACK loss detection for fast detection of lost
+	      retransmissions and tail drops.
+
+	Default: 0x1
+
 tcp_reordering - INTEGER
 	Initial reordering level of packets in a TCP stream.
 	TCP stack can then dynamically adjust flow reordering level